The Politics of Design

May 11 2016

Game Changers

Image Facepunch Studios. www.playrust.com

If you ever played a videogame you are familiar with the limited amount of choice in characters. Female gamers are used to being forced to play a male character, and usually characters have a white skin. Recently game developers have responded to the lack of diversity in games by creating game characters that better reflect society’s diversity. Rust is a first-person survival game created in 2014 by Facepunch studios from the UK. Originally all game characters were bald white men, but then developer Garry Newman decided to change this. Now every player is assigned a random character, which could be black, or white, male or female. The assigned character is used the entire game. The update immediately sparked outrage, particularly amongst white male players. Female players were more pragmatic. Newman, ‘They point out that they’ve already being play Rust as men for the past two years.’